1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a connector socket, especially to a connector socket that may receive External Serial ATA (eSATA) or Universal Serial Bus (USB) plugs and is compact and compatible with USB 3.0 specification.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the development of technology, electronic products are widely used in daily life and capable of communicate with each other through data transmission cables. And each electronic product has at least one connector socket for connectors of said data transmission cables to plug therein. The type of the at least one connector socket may be USB (Universal Serial Bus) or External Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (eSATA).
With reference to FIG. 9, a conventional connector socket is developed to have both USB and eSATA interfaces and has a casing (50), a contact seat (51), an USB 2.0 contact set (52) and an eSATA contact set (53). The USB 2.0 contact set (52) is mounted on a bottom of the contact seat (51) and has four USB contacts (520) being compatible with an USB 2.0 plug. The eSATA contact set (53) is mounted on a top of the contact seat (51), opposite to the USB 2.0 contact set (52) and has seven eSATA contacts (530) being compatible with an eSATA plug. Therefore the conventional connector socket is adapted to be connect to an USB 2.0 plug or an eSATA plug.
However, with the requirement of data transmission speed is higher and higher, the speed of a USB 2.0 plug is insufficient to support high-speed transmission between external devices. Therefore the USB specification is developed at a higher version of USB 3.0.
With reference to FIG. 10, a standard USB 3.0 plug (40) is designed to be backwards-compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 and has a cavity (41), multiple rear contacts (43) and multiple front contacts (42). The cavity (41) has a front opening. The rear contacts (43) are mounted in the cavity (41) and arranged in a row. The front contacts (42) are mounted in the cavity (41) closer to the front opening and arranged in a row. Since having much more contacts, the USB 3.0 plug can accelerate data transmission to 4.8 Gbps.
Even though the USB 3.0 plug (40) is compatible with a USB 2.0 connector socket, the USB 2.0 connector socket can not perform a full transmission speed of USB 3.0 since the connector socket do not have as much contacts. Therefore the foregoing conventional connector socket will limit transmission speed while connecting to an USB 3.0 plug and lead to time-consuming.
To overcome the shortcomings, the present invention provides a connector socket to mitigate or obviate the aforementioned problems.